Pages tagged "Fairvote"

FairVote today released Government of the Few in the “Decided Dozen" -- Frozen Representation and the Distorted Demographics of Decisive Primary Elections. Report authors Andrew Douglas and Zack Avre zero in on the “Decided Dozen”—12 states where control over the state legislature and the outcome of the great majority of general election races is never in doubt, leaving the only meaningful choices and power to voters in low turnout, unrepresentative primary contests. The report highlights two important analytic tools FairVote will use for a series of reports this summer on the broken nature of our representative democracy.

The ninth annual Voting and Elections Summit was held on February 5th and 6th. FairVote was pleased to cosponsor this year’s conference, and helped arrange speakers, hold workshops and organize one of the major plenary sessions. The event showcased a great array of speakers/presenters, and produced lively, informative discussions. Here is an overview of the various sessions/workshops, with links to videos of key segments.

You might think that nothing could be easier than voting for one candidate in an election, but analysis of voter error in California’s Top Two primary system shows surprisingly high rates of invalidated ballots in such vote-for-one elections; much higher than the normal error rate in elections conducted by ranked choice voting.

In July, the city of Santa Barbara became the most recent in a string of California cities being sued under the California Voting Rights Act for diluting the votes of their Latino population. By electing candidates at-large with fair voting, Santa Barbara could remedy any alleged vote dilution in a race neutral way, avoid the pitfalls of redistricting, and encourage the equitable election of women.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal in May signed a law establishing voting pre-registration for 16-year-olds. The law features an innovative "opt-out" approach to voter registration that will further boost registration and participation. Louisiana has a history of such innovative election policy.

On Tuesday, April 29th, a group of Colorado activists called The Coalition for a New Colorado Election System held a press conference to announce that it has begun collecting signatures for a new approach to election reform. This approach will both open the primaries to independent voters while simultaneously opening the general election to real electoral competition.

This past Tuesday, FairVote had the opportunity to present on FairVote’s key reforms to a group of Elderhostelers (now called “Road Scholars”), on winner-take-all, polarization, partisan bias, and the fair voting solution.